Apple Breaks FLOSS

“Pulling an open-source project upon which people may depend is total jerk behaviorSee Apple May Have Just Killed An Open Source Project.”It could be a breakdown in communication but Apple just acquired a company and the company’s GitHub repository shut down…

Let’s hope Apple just sent the wrong memo and will reopen the repository perhaps under a different name. Fortunately, it is FLOSS, so there are some copies more or less up to date floating around but, Apple, smarten up, be polite and give some notice next time. It is quite legal for an owner to change the terms of licensing or even to stop distribution but it’s not wise to annoy users/contributors/customers. What were they thinking?

About Robert Pogson

I am a retired teacher in Canada. I taught in the subject areas where I have worked for almost forty years: maths, physics, chemistry and computers. I love hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, too.

13 Responses to Apple Breaks FLOSS

terry jacks wrote, of Apple, “Riiight, because their charming record towards FLOSS means that this is probably just a simple mistake.”

I have no doubt that Apple thinks of Apple first, but in any acquisition/merger of businesses, it’s obvious things do fall through the cracks. Who knows what’s in the contract/agreement? Perhaps Apple wanted stuff under their control and there is an hiatus as stuff is moved to their servers… I just don’t know what their intentions are. CUPS is FLOSS and Apple seems to have done the right thing with it. Apple has come under new management. Perhaps enlightenment has arrived.whois cups.org
Registrant Organization:Apple Inc.

Ive read way too many articles about this which claim this was because open source is flawed.
Of course, like mentioned elsewhere this was core closed and some components open which is the problem. But its got just enough truth in it that it fits nicely in the agendas.

>Let’s hope Apple just sent the wrong memo

Riiight, because their charming record towards FLOSS means that this is probably just a simple mistake.
Most people reading this probably barely lifted a brow and though “Yeah, sounds like a dick move Apple would pull.”

I do not use Impress, I always created slides in Writer then converted to PDF and ran presentations in Chrome.

Lol, the person who posted this thinks PowerPoint is just an app that allows you to lay text and images on a slide. This proving my point. Those people have no idea what modern PowerPoint is, and I am too bored to explain.

Eh, this was done to OpenOffice, so people forked it and it became LibreOffice, which is better.

But without any Sun/Oracle capital and human resources in, it becomes more dated by the day.

And while their Writer kinda works if you need the absolute basics (and save as .doc), Impress is a total joke. It’s like firing up Word 97, with extra bugs. If your last contact with PowerPoint was back then (I am looking at you Pog), of course you won’t complain much. But when you have experienced PowerPoint’s templates, superb Shape tools, superb rotation abilities, management of the stack (ability to push images further down or further up the stack), and alighment abiliies, then Impress looks like an undergraduate put up a GitHub repository with the note “hey guys!!11! I just created this tool that allows you to put text and images on a slide!!11!! (and maybe video)”

Eh, this was done to OpenOffice, so people forked it and it became LibreOffice, which is better.

Note: The core of FoundationDB was closed source, but many components around it were open sourced. What this means is that people using those open source components relied on the FoundationDB core which now, alas, is no longer available

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.